The discovery of a Spanish plot to overthrow the republican government of Venice and a rising of the Protestants in the Val Telline threatened to submerge Italy in war. In northern Europe the ambitious King of Sweden secured Esthonia and Livonia from the Tsar of Russia, and projected a firm alliance with the Dutch[5] which, had it succeeded, would have established their joint control over the northern waters of Europe. In Prague an unpopular Catholic government was overthrown by a well-timed Protestant rising.
The political world was in a state of nervous exasperation acute enough to invest any one of these incidents with an exaggerated importance. The probability of war was a commonplace among the well-informed who doubted only the immediate cause and scope of the conflict; the material and moral antagonisms which divided political life were clear.
May 23rd 1618 was the date of the revolt in Prague; it is the date traditionally assigned to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. But it was not clear until seventeen months later, even to the leading men in the countries most deeply concerned, that this revolt rather than any other incident in that stormy time had lighted the fire. During the intervening months the affairs of Bohemia became slowly identified with the problems of the European situation. That situation itself brought forth the war.
2.
The partial elimination of certain administrative and physical disabilities in the last hundred years has so far altered conditions that it is not easy to appreciate seventeenth-century politics without understanding their mechanism. The routine of government was ill-organized; politicians worked with inadequate help; honesty, efficiency and loyalty were comparatively rare, and the average statesman seems to have worked on the assumption that a perpetual leakage of funds and information was inevitable.
The diplomatic tempo of Europe was that of the horse traffic on which all communications rested, and political necessity was subjected to the meaningless interventions of nature: contrary winds or heavy snows played their part in averting or precipitating international crisis. Vital decisions had to be postponed or in some desperate case thrust upon an underling without time to consult a higher authority.
The faulty transmission of news excluded public opinion from any dominant part in politics. The peasantry for the most part lived in ignorance of the events happening about them, suffered their effects mutely and broke into revolt only when conditions became intolerable. Among townsfolk a better diffusion of knowledge made possible the rudimentary expression of public opinion, but only the relatively wealthy and well-educated consistently assimilated or made use of political information. The great majority of the people remained powerless, ignorant, and indifferent. The public acts and private character of individual statesmen thus assumed disproportionate significance, and dynastic ambitions governed the diplomatic relations of Europe.
The insecurity and discomfort of life encouraged irresponsibility in the ruler. Wars brought with them no immediate upheaval since they were fought largely by professional armies, and the civilian population—except in the actual area of fighting—remained undisturbed at least until the need for money caused an exceptional levy on private wealth. Even in the actual district of the conflict the impact of war was at first less overwhelming than in the nicely balanced civilization of to-day. Bloodshed, rape, robbery, torture, and famine were less revolting to a people whose ordinary life was encompassed by them in milder forms. Robbery with violence was common enough in peace-time, torture was inflicted at most criminal trials, horrible and prolonged executions were performed before great audiences; plague and famine effected their repeated and indiscriminate devastations.
The outlook even of the educated was harsh. Underneath a veneer of courtesy, manners were primitive; drunkenness and cruelty were common in all classes, judges were more often severe than just, civil authority more often brutal than effective, and charity came limping far behind the needs of the people. Discomfort was too natural to provoke comment; winter’s cold and summer’s heat found European man lamentably unprepared, his houses too damp and draughty for the one, too airless for the other. Prince and beggar were alike inured to the stink of decaying offal in the streets, of foul drainage about the houses, to the sight of carrion birds picking over public refuse dumps or rotting bodies swinging on the gibbets. On the road from Dresden to Prague a traveller counted ‘above seven score gallowses and wheels, where thieves were hanged, some fresh and some half rotten, and the carcases of murderers broken limb after limb on the wheels’.[6]
The pressure of war on such a society had to be intensified and prolonged before any popular outcry was evoked, and by then the matter was usually beyond control.
France, England, Spain, Germany—already in the seventeenth century the historian is faced by these conglomerate abstracts. The self-conscious nation existed even if its connexion with the individuals who composed it was hard to define; all peoples had their border problems, their minorities, their divisions. In certain professions there was a fluidity which is startling to the modern mind: no one thought it strange that a French soldier should command an army against the French, and loyalty to a cause, to a religion, even to a master, was commonly more highly esteemed than loyalty to a country. In spite of this, nationality was gaining a modified political significance. ‘There is a necessity all men should love their country;’ wrote Ben Jonson, ‘he that professeth the contrary, may be delighted with his words, but his heart is there.’
But for the most part, national feelings could be exploited by the sovereign with whose rule they were connected, and the dynasty was, with few exceptions, more important in European diplomacy than the nation. Royal marriages were the rivets of international policy and the personal will of the sovereign or the interests of his family its motive forces. For all practical purposes France and Spain are misleading terms for the dynasties of Bourbon and Hapsburg.
Meanwhile the basis of society was altering so that the ruler was faced with new problems. In the majority of western European countries, government was aristocratic and had been evolved in a society where land and power were one. This form outlived the actual replacement of land by money as an effective force, so that political authority remained in the hands of those who had not the wealth to execute their will, and the merchant classes, who had the means but not the authority, were in frequent opposition.
The rise of a class independent of the land had been balanced by a corresponding decline of the peasantry. In the feudal system, based on the mutual obligations of master and tenant, the serf had a recognized if inferior position. The vocal discontent of the peasant dates from the collapse of feudalism, from the period when the landed and governing classes converted the labour of their serfs into money and exploited the conditions of their tenure to make their farms profitable.
The feudal system had presupposed a world in which everyone was connected with the land and the responsibility for his bodily welfare rested with the landlord. As that supposition came to bear less relation to the facts, new duties devolved on Church and State. Slow transport, bad communications and lack of money prevented the central government from creating the necessary mechanism to support these growing burdens, so that the State repeatedly delegated its power to already existing bodies—to the Justice of the Peace in England, to the parish priest or the local landowner in Sweden, to the headman of the village or the burgomaster of the town in France, to the nobility in Poland, Denmark, and Germany. Thus no government could rely on the execution of its measures unless it had the support of these indispensable assistants. This was what gave the Polish, German, Danish nobility and the English gentry a power over the central government unjustified by their actual wealth and redressed the balance between the landed and the merchant classes.
But there was no adequate connexion between the legislative and executive powers, nor any clear conception of the uses of public money. Because taxation had been evolved for the most part to replace the old service in arms, demands for money were inextricably confused in the popu
lar mind with the emergency of war. The idea of taxation for public services had hardly yet been born. Parliaments, Estates, Stande and Cortes, all those partly representative bodies which had grown up in past centuries, considered that a crisis alone justified the demand for money and persistently refused to help the government to bear its daily responsibilities. Out of this misunderstanding more than one evil arose. Rulers recklessly anticipated their revenue, sold Crown lands, mortgaged their royal privileges, and thus progressively weakened the central government.
This confusion explains the bitterness and suspicion towards their rulers common to the middle classes in the early seventeenth century, a bitterness manifested in permanent obstruction and occasional revolt. Periods of transition are always periods of mismanagement; thus the predominant demand of the time was for efficiency. Acutely conscious of the prevailing insecurity, that small section of the populace which exercised its influence was in general prepared to accept any government which could guarantee peace and order.
The underlying cause of the demand for a voice in politics was thus not so much the principle of liberty as the desire for efficient government. Theories of right and wrong, of divine ordination or the innate equality of men, formed the rallying cries, the symbols for which men died with profound sincerity, a king of England by the axe no less than an Austrian peasant on the wheel. But success or failure in the end depended on the efficiency of the administrative machine. Few men are so disinterested as to prefer to live in discomfort under a government which they hold to be right rather than in comfort under one which they hold to be wrong. Representative government in Bohemia failed because it was signally worse managed than the despotism it replaced, and the Stewarts fell not because Divine Right was unsound but because their government was incompetent.
3.
The generation which preceded the Thirty Years War may not have been more virtuous than its predecessors, but it was certainly more devout. The reaction from the materialism of the Renaissance which had begun towards the middle of the previous century had now reached its widest limits; the spiritual revival had penetrated to the very roots of society and religion was a reality among those to whom politics were meaningless and public events unknown.
Theological controversy became the habitual reading of all classes, sermons directed their politics and moral tracts beguiled their leisure. Among the Catholics the cult of the Saints reached proportions unheard of for centuries and assumed a dominant part in the experience of the educated as well as of the masses; miracles once again made the life of everyday bright with hope. The changes of the material world, the breakdown of old tradition and the insufficiency of dying conventions drove men and women to the spiritual and the inexplicable. Those whom the wide arms of the Churches could not receive took refuge in the occult: Rosicrucianism had crept from Germany to France, Illuminism was gaining hold in Spain. Fear of witchcraft grew among the educated and devil-worship spread among the populace. Black magic was practised from the desolate north of Scotland to the Mediterranean islands, holding the fierce Celts, the oppressed peasants of Russia, Poland, Bohemia in vengeful terror, no less than sensible merchants of Germany and stolid yeomen of Kent.
Superstitious beliefs were fostered by a pamphlet literature in which every strange happening was immediately recorded and magnified. Gruesome fears lingered even among the educated. A distinguished scholar in Württemberg ascribed the death of his brother either to ‘robbers or ghosts’.[7] A Prince of Anhalt, an intelligent and sober young man, recorded the seeing of phantoms in his diary[8] without a flicker of surprise or incredulity. The Electoral family of Brandenburg believed firmly in the ‘White Lady’ who appeared to warn them of approaching death and who on one occasion had dealt such a box on the ear to an officious page who had incommoded her that he died soon after.[9] The Duke of Bavaria had his wife exorcized to lift the curse of sterility which he believed had been placed upon her.[10]
A pseudo-scientific interest in astrology was the fashion. Kepler himself, half humorously, half indignantly, averred that the astronomer could only support himself by ministering to the follies of astronomy’s ‘silly little daughter’, astrology.[11] He himself was one of that small group of acute thinkers whom the unrest of the times drove to explore not the heights of faith but the structure and possibilities of the material world. In the latter half of the sixteenth century schools of anatomy had been established at Padua, Basel, Montpelier and Würzburg. At Rome in 1603, at Rostock in 1619, attempts were made to form societies for the study of natural history.[12] At Copenhagen and in all the schools of Denmark a young and enlightened King was encouraging the teaching of physics, mathematics and the natural sciences. The discovery of the circulation of the blood by William Harvey was within a few years to revolutionize the practice of medicine, even as the study of the material world had been revolutionized by Galileo’s assertion that the earth revolved round the sun.
Before Galileo’s discovery the antithesis between faith and science had been partly admitted. Luther had cried out against the ‘harlot reason’. Philosophy, science, and the process of reasoned thought were felt to be safe only so long as they were guided by revealed religion. Truth sprang from direct and divine revelation; scientific facts, for which man had no better evidence than that of his own faculties, might be merely the calculated deception of the devil. The natural conservatism of the human mind helped the Churches in their opposition to the new outlook. Men wanted certainties, not more causes for doubt, and since the discoveries of science perplexed them with strange theories about the earth on which they walked and the bodies they inhabited, they turned with all the more zeal to the firm assurances of religion.
Never had the Churches seemed stronger than in the opening decades of the seventeenth century. Yet a single generation was to witness their deposition from political dominance. The collapse was implicit in the situation of 1618. The fundamental issue was between revealed and rationalized belief, but the sense of danger was not strong enough to bring the Churches together. The lesser issue between Catholic and Protestant obscured the greater, and the Churches had already set the scene for their own destruction.
Superficially there seemed to be two religions in Europe, the Catholic and the Protestant, but in fact the latter was so clearly divided against itself that there were three hostile parties. The Reformation had had two outstanding leaders, Luther and Calvin, and was divided by their teaching, or more exactly by the political consequences of their teaching, into two successive and far from complementary movements. An emotional rather than an intellectual man, Luther had easily fallen a victim to the ambitions of the governing classes: secular rulers had welcomed his teaching because it freed them from the interference of a foreign Pope, and the young movement, too weak to stand on its own feet, had become the servant of the State. Its spiritual force was not destroyed but was at least partly stifled by its material power, and the new Church flourished in the wealth and respectability of its members, grew because kings protected it and merchants approved. This is not to condemn Lutheranism, for men follow their own interests for the highest as well as for the lowest causes, and neither princes nor peoples accepted Lutheranism in the blandly cynical spirit which a later analysis of their motives might seem to reveal. They believed, doubtless, because they wanted to believe, but the stress in their own minds was on belief, not on desire. Some at least of them died for their faith.
Moreover, the initial defiance of the Pope did not altogether lose its significance because it was so immediately adapted by the secular powers to serve their age-old quarrel with spiritual authority. If the reformed Church gave little encouragement to rebels once it was entrenched behind the State, it had at least shattered the unity of Catholic Christendom and made way for the exercise of a freer judgement.
Luther’s interference in spiritual matters solved the problem of religion for a section of society only; popular unrest was aggravated, not allayed, by the advent of a new faith which, thank
s to its immediate exploitation by the governing powers, showed no spiritual superiority over the Catholic Church. The re-birth of both Catholic and Protestant Europe was not the work of Luther but the simultaneous achievement of two men working from two opposing sides. In 1536 Calvin published his Christianae Religionis Institutio; two years before, Ignatius Loyola had founded the Society of Jesus.
Luther saw religion as the mainstay and comfort of humanity, felt for his fellow-men and spoke because he could no longer remain silent. Calvin saw religion as a revelation of God’s reason, an assemblage of inescapable deductions from the inspired writings, a thing good in itself, without regard to the material needs of human kind. The fundamental doctrines of Calvinism are those of Grace and Predestination; the ultimate fate of each soul, whether for Heaven or Hell, is foreordained by an all-knowing God, and a man is born either with or without Grace.
The Thirty Years War Page 2
